Medical patients commonly experience stress and anxiety when facing an upcoming medical procedure. The sources of stress may be numerous including concerns about qualifications of medical personnel, potential risks associated with the medical procedure, length of the recovery process, possible complications, etc. Although patients are often aware of their anxiety, the exact causes for their concerns may be difficult to identify. The sources of anxiety vary greatly between different patients based on a wide array of factors, including age, sex, race, education level, socioeconomic status, prior medical history, religion, profession, place of residence, etc.
A major cause of stress for patients is due to concerns associated with how the medical procedure, hospitalization, and recovery will affect their familial, social, and business relationships. Effectively communicating concerns about a medical procedure to family and friends may prove difficult for many patients. Finding the right words to comfort one's spouse, children, parents, and friends may be even more difficult. Furthermore, a major source of stress for many patients is associated with responsibility of informing one's employer, colleagues, or clients about upcoming medical leave, the uncertainty of its duration, and providing continuous updates about the outcome of the procedure and the status of the recovery process.
Accordingly, there is a need for an automated system capable of accurately identifying concerns of a medical patient based on the patient's personal information and the nature of the upcoming procedure, helping the patient coping with these concerns, and automatically sending updates about the patient's health status to individuals selected by the patient. However, in view of the prior art considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, it was not obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art how the limitations of the art could be overcome.